Washington, DC, September 19—Protests for better healthcare under capitalism continued at the White House as a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member joined 50 people suffering from Long Covid-19. We demanded that the Biden administration expand research into conditions that follow viral infections such as Covid-19, mono, bird flu, and other infections.

Contrary to liberal president Joe Biden’s false claim, the “pandemic is NOT over.” The marchers called for a federal program like the Ryan White Act for HIV that could provide wrap-around services for students and workers suffering from Long Covid-19 and similar long-term illnesses. The  pandemic is far from over! And racist healthcare for all workers will never be over until capitalism is. We need the working class to rule the world.

Capitalism is always willing to discard disabled workers who they can’t exploit for profit. As Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845, "the class which at present holds social and political control [the bourgeoisie] places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death." The ruling class is fine with the social murder of our class. But we can’t let them get away with murder.

Covid under capitalism remains deadly
Later that day, a PL’er joined others in a listening session with the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education to explain how schools should better provide equal education to students with disabilities. The PLP member has been meeting with friends and fighters with disabilities to make demands around education sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic. These include virtual learning, high quality filtration/ventilation including HEPA filters, masks, and accommodations for students with symptoms. This is what communists would do if we had to manage Covid-19. By removing the profit motive, our class would be able to run society based on needs and commitment.

Covid related illnesses often cause damage to multiple organ systems including the brain, heart, blood vessels, and GI tract. Symptoms include fatigue, headache, cognitive impairment and rashes. Doctors have trouble making a diagnosis and patients thus go undiagnosed. The multiple specialists they then see can make treatment elusive. The waxing and waning of Covid symptoms adds to the confusion. Even exercise can make symptoms worse.

Research from from the World Health Network's Long COVID Symposium (9/15) has found clotting processes and damage to the lining of blood vessels, the persistence of viral particles and metabolic changes including dysautonomia (e.g.. fast heart rate when standing). But more work is needed in this area. The bosses don’t care about supporting these workers and students, thus condemning many to a life of disability and early death.

As we fight for and build a communist society that values all workers and supports their efforts to learn and contribute, we can support people with disabilities and bring them and their particular struggles into the PLP.

Texas, September 21—Governor Greg Abbott launched Operation Lonestar, a belligerent, racist campaign to criminalize workers desperate to escape the horrors of U.S. imperialism. In a clear demonstration of the bitter rivalry between the Small Fascist conservatives and the Big Fascist liberals, the Abbott administration transported migrant workers, arriving on the Texas border, to democrat run states along the Northeast. This is life under capitalism.

A few months into the offensive more than 11,000 migrant workers from Latin America and Africa have been bussed in working class neighborhoods (U.S.A Today, 9/2) with thousands being dumped in New York City shelters with no money, clothing, and given few resources to ensure their survival (The City, 9/16).

In response to this abhorrent racist attack on our class,  PLP members involved in college campuses and community organizations that fight for housing have been circulating literature to students and workers facing racist displacement and homelessness. Below is an excerpt of the flyer:

Around the world, close to 100 million workers have been displaced. Whether from starvation, unemployment, environmental catastrophes, soaring rents, or real estate speculation, the capitalist system sacrifices workers daily for profits.

Right now, we’re seeing the global capitalist crisis in full swing as thousands of new migrants arrive from Texas to NYC. Migrant workers are fleeing imperialist violence only to find themselves in New York City, the world’s wealthiest, so-called sanctuary city. NYC is also one of the most unequal, segregated racist cities in the world. They will join their Black (52 percent), Latin (22 percent), and white (48 percent) working-class siblings who make up the bulk of the City’s shelter system (Daily News, 1/22/20).

To make matters worse, members of our class are used as pawns in a battle between an increasingly divided U.S. ruling class. On the one hand is Texas Governor Abbott, who represents the Trumpian Small Fascist faction and domestic fossil fuel bosses like Charles and David Koch. This wing is cruelly using immigrant families in the fight with the liberal Big Fascist imperialist wing (see Glossary, page 6) fronted by Biden. Biden represents the main financial, corporate, and big real estate wing of the capitalist rulers.

We demand housing for ALL! Mayor Adams says there’s no money: A LIE! These bosses are only here to serve profit, not working people. For decades New York State has given developers billions of dollars in tax breaks to build luxury housing. But, communism will mean we workers will organize ourselves to be housed and cared for. 

As communists, we build confidence in our class’s ability to lead. The reform demands in this housing struggle are for politicians to stop giving our tax money to developers,  build 100 percent low-income housing, open all vacant buildings and apartments, and stop evictions. Being involved in this fight helps build up masses of workers to see the need to run the world. As long as for-profit housing exists, workers will never have access to safe, decent  housing. This is why we must fight for communism!

Black, Latin, Asian, white, all workers must UNITE!
Both Democrats and Republicans cynically use immigrants to build their bases for the upcoming elections. While Small Fascist Abbott busses migrants to sanctuary haven NYC to rile up his racist base, Biden helped Obama deport more migrants than any president in history at the time. Meanwhile, top Black KKKop, Big Fascist Eric Adams smiles to welcome migrant workers, and then stuffs them into already overcrowded shelters, thus pitting homeless workers against migrant workers as he helps real estate developers and landlords jack up rents and displace more workers.

The Big Fascist liberals like Adams and Biden do not care about migrant, Black, Asian, white, Latin, or any workers. As China and the U.S. inch closer toward World War III, the Big Fascists will sacrifice more workers to their economy, whether it be in the form of mass incarceration or more homelessness. Biden, openly preparing for war with China, sees immigrants as cannon fodder for his imperialist ventures. The working class must not allow the fascists, Big and Small, to divide us. Our strongest weapon is our unity, and we will need to come together in solidarity to resist these fascists.

Capitalists and all its agents are the enemies of the working class. Capitalism doesn’t deserve to exist. Be it through climate or economic disaster, nuclear war, or pandemics, capitalism is destroying the world. We need international, working-class unity to fight for communism, a system in which the welfare and prosperity of the working class are above all else because we will abolish the profit motive. Join PLP! Join the fight against displacement!

Inflation is the latest way the capitalist system’s crises are deepening the oppression of workers around the world. Capitalism is driven by competition and profit accumulation and generates global economic and political instability, preventing stability and wellbeing for the world’s working class. While inflation is depriving U.S. workers of some of life’s necessities, the U.S.’s export of inflation to other countries is even more devastating. We fight to replace this absurd system with a worker-run planned economy – communism.

What is Inflation?
Inflation is a rise in average prices of goods and services. In the U.S., the annual core inflation rate rose to 6.3 percent in August. Adding in food and energy costs lifts the inflation rate to 8.3 percent annually. Food prices alone in the U.S. are rising over 11 percent annually, increasing hunger and poverty, while rising at an even faster pace in less developed countries. Wages are not rising similarly so workers’ purchasing power is falling.

After 40 years of relative stability, why inflation in the U.S. now? Causes include the monopoly power of corporations, government aiding corporations, and COVID shutdowns and shortages caused by supply chain disruptions and war. Wage raises are not a cause of inflation but an effort to keep up.

Different responses to crises, same goal of maximizing profit
Capitalists and the government responded differently to the financial crisis of 2007-2009 and today’s ongoing COVID crisis.

Threats to profits during the 2007-2009 crisis led capitalists to lay off workers and cut wages and benefits (labor costs account for 60-70% of production costs). To suppress resistance, the capitalists divide and weaken workers through racism and sexism, oppose new union creation (e.g., Amazon), and outlast or break strikes. Unemployment (which reached 10% in 2009) served to further weaken workers, as competition for jobs led to lower wages. Labor’s share of national income fell while productivity (output per worker) rose sharply and profits remained strong during this earlier period.

COVID created another profitability crisis for capitalists with consumer spending plummeting and supply chain disruptions forcing up the bosses’ costs. As the pandemic began to recede, the bosses faced a relative labor shortage (the official unemployment rate reached 3.5% of the labor force, the lowest point in decades) because many workers quit working or retired during the “great resignation.” To recruit workers back, many firms raised money wages (albeit lower than the rate of inflation) and improved benefits slightly, which cut into their profits. The resurgence in the labor movement, with union organizing and strikes, compounded this threat.

Unlike the financial crisis, the COVID crisis caused shortages of key inputs for capitalist production at a time when they have been less able to force down wages. The capitalists have instead taken advantage of inflationary pressures to bolster profits through price increases. From 2021-2022, 59.3 percent of change in prices has gone to swell profit margins; 38.3% of price increases were for the increased cost of non-labor inputs that capitalists had to buy; and only 7.9 percent of the increased prices went to labor costs (J. Bivens, EPI, 4/21). The higher prices cut the purchasing power of workers across the board, obliterating any improvements in money wages.

Myths about the “the market” are used to convince workers that capitalism is fair
How can the bosses inflate prices across the board so readily? Isn’t capitalism’s “market competition” system supposed to keep prices in line with costs of production? In a competitive market, capitalists would have to sell their goods at the same price as their competitors. But the 20th century saw the rise of huge corporate monopolists which have cornered the market. Today’s monopolists are price makers and set prices as they wish. They are able to escape the “discipline of the market.” Monopolists still cannot raise prices so high that the number of people willing to buy their products falls so low as to actually reduce their revenues. However, in industries like food, housing, and energy where people have few alternatives, capitalists have “gone big” on price increases, generating profits over and above their usual profitable exploitation of workers.

To end this insanity workers must seize state power
Governments (the State), far from representing the interests of all the people, carry out policies that reinforce the capitalist system of exploitation. These policies are usually geared to help the extremely wealthy monopolists. When there is an economic crisis, the state can create lots of money and encourage lower interest rates to help such businesses. The executive branch, usually with Congress’s agreement, bails out major banks, insurance companies, and corporations, including the hundreds of billions of dollars it provided during the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

During COVID many workers could not buy products or pay rents, so to protect vendors and landlords the government issued checks to families, which incidentally temporarily lessened hunger and evictions.  Congress gave large appropriations to big pharma, both enhancing their billions in profits while providing vaccines to workers. More workers survived -- and kept generating profits for the bosses.
With today’s inflation, capitalists and their state enhance their profits, while depriving workers of needed products and services. The system is stacked against the working class.

U.S. imperialists export inflation
As bad as inflation is in the U.S., it is far worse in other countries. Why? After World War II, the U.S. was able to establish the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Oil and many other globally traded goods are therefore priced in dollars, helping keep the demand for dollars high. Increases in the U.S. interest rates over the past year have made the dollar even more attractive to investors, raising the dollar’s value further. A rising dollar means that the currencies of other countries lose value, making their imported goods that are priced in dollars even more expensive in those countries. This has led to higher inflation rates in other countries and even greater distress.

Capitalism is a system of crises, wars, and suffering
Imperialist war and rivalry disrupt the world economy with inflationary pressures as well. The war in Ukraine, for example, led to European boycotts of Russian energy resources. The resulting shortages have driven up prices of key products. Russia has prevented food exports from Ukraine, creating massive shortages globally and crushing countries like Sri Lanka, Somalia, and Pakistan.

Capitalist classes prefer stable prices, keeping inflation rates at around 2%. When inflation exceeds such rates, the capitalists use the  state to fight inflation by creating recessions. This is sometimes called “cooling off the economy.” They raise interest rates and shrink the money supply. This forces workers to forgo credit-dependent big-ticket items like automobiles and houses, while the costs of debt skyrocket and businesses are forced to lessen their borrowing for expansion. As a result, millions of workers get laid off and wages fall. Many small businesses go bankrupt and many large businesses close or are taken over by larger companies. Capitalism swings between crises, creating one (inflation) and trying to solve it with another (recession)!

Why can’t economic distress be solved without increased prices? Why can’t abundance, or scarcity, be shared among all workers equitably? Capitalism, run by the dominant class for its own profit, simply can’t allow it because such a system undermines profits.

With today’s inflation, despite multiple causes, U.S. capitalists are grabbing the opportunity to maximize their profits at our expense, by reducing our real wages and saddling the world with even more severe inflation. The instability and uncertainty promote deeper global economic, political, and military conflicts. Why should workers tolerate such chaos? We need to smash capitalism!

Have you wondered about chemicals or other harmful substances in our food and water? Do you assume governmental agencies—the FSIS (Food, Safety, Inspection Service), the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control)—look out for our best interest, health, and well-being? Are we safe with high quality food and water? After reading this article, ask yourself these questions again.

Weed killer in our bodies
A Time Magazine online article 2017, (October) reviews several studies, showing that glyphosate, a weed killer known as Roundup, is increasingly showing up in people’s bodies. Here’s some evidence:  

A study published in JAMA tracked people over the age of 50 in Southern California from 1993-1996 to 2014-2016. Researchers found that the percentage of people who tested positive for glyphosate shot up by 500 percent in that time period.

One trial from the United Kingdom, in which rats were fed low levels of glyphosate throughout their lives, found that the chemical contributed to a higher risk of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.

Recent studies have found that many weeds are now resistant to Roundup, so growers are using more Roundup. (The Guardian 7/9). A CDC study found glyphosate was present in more than 80 percent of urine samples drawn from children and adults  (The Guardian 7/9). This chemical is linked to cancer, a finding scientists have called “disturbing” and “concerning.” Lianne Sheppard (University of Washington) co-authored a 2019 analysis that found that glyphosate exposure increases the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

And whether it’s weed killer or lead in our water this attack on the working class is viciously racist. There’s even now a phrase for it: environmental racism (nydailynews.com, 1/28/20).

Lead in workers’ water puts bosses’ racist system at work
In 2014, Flint, Michigan, changed its water supply from Lake Huron to the polluted Flint River without testing the water. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) declared the water safe to drink.

Residents of Flint immediately exposed the brown color and odor coming from their taps on social media, which the Flint officials dismissed. The child lead poisoning rate doubled. Hurley Medical Center created a health registry and proved that lead in the water was poisoning children. Flint has a population that’s 54% Black. As often is the case, Black workers suffer from the most extreme forms of environmental terrorism.

In 2021, nine Michigan officials, including the former Michigan Governor, were finally indicted on criminal charges including manslaughter and neglect of duty for polluting Flint water. In June 2022, the Michigan Supreme Court tossed out the indictments on procedural grounds.

The situation in Flint is repeated over and over nationwide. While the government treats an industry’s action to pollute rivers, lakes, waterways and the ocean as a sacrosanct right, the working class’s need for clean water is treated as a luxury. Fifty percent of U.S. lakes and rivers are “too polluted for swimming, fishing, and drinking(EcoWatch, 3/29 ).”

San Francisco Bay is polluted with radiation from Navy shipyards and banned industrial chemicals, mercury from gold and silver mining. The Pacific Ocean is polluted with radiation from atomic bomb testing and the Fukushima meltdown. The list goes on and on.

The State exists to serve the needs of capitalists, not workers

As you ponder our safety regarding the basic necessities of life, food and water, remember the social and economic benefits from pollution are reaped by the capitalist class while the social costs are paid by the working class.

Weed-killer glyphosate in our urine and lead-fouled water in our taps are just two examples of neglect of public health by U.S. governmental authorities, federal, state and local. The entire food and water supply is poisoned by pollutants, pesticides and additives like sugar, preservatives, salt and unhealthy oils. The FDA doesn’t prevent the food industry from profiting by pushing harmful foods on us. Why don’t they protect us from bad food and foul water? Why is there no effective public health system in the U.S.? 

Why don’t governments care?  Because the purpose of government (the state) under capitalism is to serve the interests of the capitalist class. If harmful food and water is more profitable for the capitalists, then the government protects their right to supply it, over the dead bodies of the working class.

Some say that politicians and officials are bought off and the working class can root out corruption to correct the problem. Denying our class’ basic needs is a function of, not corruption, but capitalism itself. This has been going on since the beginning of capitalism– whatever the capitalists want, the government makes sure they get it. The role of government is to serve the needs of their masters, the capitalist class.
Progressive Labor Party calls to build a new society, governed by and for the working class. To do so, we need to smash capitalism and its state.